Blog Changes
I have made several changes here at Mephistos over the last several days. There are more in the works to be sure, but here in follows an update of some of the ones that I have completed thus far. Some are updates to some plugins and others are that occasional these are things we got going on and some are just changes to the appearance of things here. And a couple of these have to do with some stagnant blogs over on a couple of other places, namely Traveller’s Haven Farms and the Lance of St. Eligius sites.
- Easy AdSense – This is a nifty plugin that does Google AdSense advertising on your blog site. It will do the widget in the sidebar, search, and the link panel. It really has some power though, by the ability to include in the blog text advertising. I was already doing AdSense advertising by just putting a text box in as widget and placing the code into it. You still have to provide the appropriate code to a set of boxes (that will be generated from your Google AdSense account). From there you can set some options and automatically have it show up in places for you. Though I have to admit that I did not like having to turn it back on after a recent update (it did retain settings).
- Format & Layout - I have made the blog part slightly wider to more easily accommodate a few things I wanted to do and make the blog a little easier to read (at least I think so). The new layout uses a lot of screen, so do let me know if anyone who has a small screen does not like it. I also changed some icons and graphics, making them slightly smaller, which left a bit more room for some of the text, especially in labels and links on the sidebars. Makes for less cryptic titles and the like.
- Global Translator - A nice little tool that gives you a set of flags to click on once it all enabled and configured. It will pull either a cached translated version of the site or do a translation on the fly do a fairly quick translation using one about four engines (can be user selectable). I only really know one other language and can manage in a couple of others from reading to get a general idea. The translations look pretty good, though some extra navigation and such does get lost in the translation. I do have a few folks from Spain hitting my site and a several friends from across Europe so providing such a handy tool that is easy is a nice option.
- GD Star Rating – A fairly cool tool with so many options it is almost mind numbing. As a basic tool it allows for ratings of stars 1-10 of a blog, comment post, pages, and more. Options include changing when and where the rating tools show up, the ability to turn them off for various parts of the blog, using a different number of stars and even a thumbs up/down type of rating system. I am giving this one a try at a suggestion from someone at this point, but I am not completely sure that I am going to keep it running long-term or not. Feedback is welcome on this.
- Sociable – Another tool that lets sharing take place across several different social networks. I like this one in that it gives the mini favicon size icon to each of the social networks as a click-able option to share to it. Advantage is the visual of course. Disadvantage is the space it takes up. I have tried a couple of different options for doing this and keep coming back to Share This. At this time I am going to run both of them at the bottom of the posts and see how it works out.
- Lance of St Eligius – This is a site I have had for a while and back about six months ago I converted it to a blog for keeping schedules, updates of what I am doing in regards to medieval stuff and especially to reside as a repository for pictures. That is still the plan, despite having allowed it to fall off in a major way. I still have tons of pictures to get up there as well LOTS of other things. I have found myself even posting some things here on Mephistos that should go there. I am going to organize it a bit different in the near future and push the appropriate post from here to there when it makes sense. I still plan to get the huge amount of pictures and such posted up there one of these days as well.
- Traveller’s Haven Farms – I can almost ditto what was said above for Eligius for Traveller’s, as pretty much it is in the same state. It basically needs the same things done with it to take get it up to speed.
